Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  A voice buzzed in her ear. “P-51 21054, this is Tower, you are cleared for takeoff.”

  This was a crouched tiger preparing to leap. A rocket ready to explode. The nose was higher than the tail; she couldn’t even see straight ahead— just straight up, past sleek silver into blue sky.

  She eased the throttle forward, and the plane started moving. Then it really started moving. The tail lifted—she could see ahead of her now, to the end of the runaway. Her speed increased, and she watched the dials in front of her. At a hundred miles per hour, she pulled back on the stick, lifted, and left earth behind. Climbed fast, into clear blue sky, like a bullet, like a hawk. She glanced over her shoulder; the airstrip was already tiny. Nothing but open sky ahead, and all the speed she could push out of this thing.

  This was heaven.

  “Luckiest girl in the world,” she murmured, thinking that Mary would have loved this.

  <>

  * * * *

  S. M. Stirling

  Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is the bestselling author of the Nantucket series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket comes unstuck in time and is cast back to the year 1250 BC, and the Draka series (including Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon, plus an anthology of Draka stories by other hands edited by Stirling, Drakas!), in which Tories fleeing the American Revolution set up a militant society in South Africa and eventually end up conquering most of the earth. He’s also produced the Emberverse series (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis), plus the five-volume Fifth Milennium series and the seven-volume General series (with David Drake), as well as stand-alone novels such as Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers, and The Sky People. Stirling has also written novels in collaboration with Raymond F. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, as well as contributing to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin War series. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Stirling’s newest series is an Emberverse tetralogy of the Change, so far in three volumes, The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, and The Sword of the Lady. His most recent book is In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, sequel to The Sky People. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  In the action-packed story that follows, he shows us how an unlikely alliance is forged between two very different kinds of warriors, and then sends them on an even more unlikely mission together, a hair-raisingly dangerous mission that will test their resolve, their ingenuity, and their courage—and the bounds of friendship.

  * * * *

  Ancient Ways

  It was a hot day in July, the two thousandth and fifty-fifth year of Our Lord; or fifty-seven years since the Change, plus a few months. The feather-grass of the middle Volga steppe rustled around him, rolling to the edge of sight in knee-high blond waves. Sergey Ivanovitch’s jaws moved steadily on the stick of tasteless dried mutton as he lay on his belly and watched through his binoculars as the strange rider approached, ant-small at first under the immense blue dome of the sky. Now and then, he sipped from a leather flask, water cut with corn brandy to make it safe to drink.

  “Who is this one, sorry nag?” he said idly, either to himself or the horse lying behind him, mentally checking on the locations of his weapons. “Balls of brass, to ride here alone. Or in a hurry, Christ witness.”

  He chewed cautiously on the stick of jerky, since it was like gnawing on a board, and occasionally used his dagger to slice off shavings. His teeth were a young man’s intact set, which he wanted to keep as long as possible. At forty-eight, his father Ivan Mikhailovitch had exactly five discolored stubs left in his jaws and had to live on boiled cabbage and soup, when he wasn’t drunk and living on liquor, which admittedly was most of the time.

  Whoever he was, the stranger was coming on fairly fast—canter-trot-canter, with two remounts behind him on a leading rein. Three horses would be very welcome when the traders from Belgorod came.

  “So, does he run away ortoward?”

  Sergey was here on the chance of running across some saiga antelope or wild horses. And to get away from thestanitsa—Cossack village—and his family’s crowded rammed-earth cabin and the squalling of his younger brothers and sisters and the endless chores for a while before harvest pinned everyone down.

  And because his grandfather Mikhail had died, and it was unseemly to grieve too openly before others for a man of eighty—it was the will of God and the way of nature, and it became a Cossack to be scornful of death. Mikhail had been a great man, one of the few left who’d been a grown man before the Change; and one of the leaders who’d seen the Don Host reborn.

  I am the last of them, the old man had said just before he stopped breathing. The last, and a world dies again with me.

  Sergey hadn’t known what Grandfather Mikhail had meant by that, but it made his eyes prickle nonetheless; he shoved the thought roughly away and concentrated on what was at hand.

  “And he could throw an axe like an angel,” he muttered. “Christ welcome you, Grandfather.”

  A clump of trees and the remnants of old orchards to the north surrounding the snags of some ruined buildings were the only signs that this had once been tilled ground, in the days before the machines stopped. The great river’s bend was only eighty kilometers eastward hereabouts, but folk from his stanitsa didn’t go that way, not if they valued their heads. Too many of the infidel flat-faces ranged there. The feud between Russki and Tartar went back long before the time of the Red Czars and the age of wizards, to the dim days of legend.

  “And sometimes you see some of those Kuban bastards this far north,” he mused. “And Daghestanis...Quiet, limb of Satan,” he added as his mount stirred.

  The big rawboned gray beast was well-trained and stayed lying prone behind him, both of them sweating under the hot noon sun. Tiny white grasshoppers spurted out of the grass-stems when he shifted his weight on his elbows, and the air smelled of ozone and hay—as well as horse and man’s-sweat, leather and metal.

  “Glory be to God forever and ever,” he muttered to himself as the man’s features and dress began to show details in the twin lenses. “I don’t think he’s a Tartar at all; not a Nogai, at least.”

  That was what the flat-face tribes around the Volga called themselves these days, and Sergey’s people knew them well from war and trade and the odd marriage-by-abduction. The stranger’s helmet was a blunt cone with a spike on top and a belt of fur around the rim, not wound with a turban; he wore his hair in a black pigtail, too. And his stirrup-leathers were adjusted fairly long, not in the short knees-up goblin Tartar style.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t kill him, then. Not right away. Father Cherepanin will scold me if I kill a Christian just for his horses.”

  And it would be a shame to miss asking him some questions; Sergey could feel his curiosity itching like a mosquito bite. Grandfather Mikhail had always scorned the younger generation because they were pinned to one place, and boasted of how he’d roamed from Germany to China in the service of Great Russ, in the old days before the Change. Most of Sergey’s generation had little time for stories of the days of the Red Czars, but they’d made him wistful sometimes. And life in thestanitsa could get dull.

  Or if Olga finds out about Svetlana, then it could get far too interesting for comfort!

  The oncoming rider was jogging along on a horse not quite like anything the Cossack had seen before; short-legged, shaggy, with a head like a barrel and a round tubby body. It didn’t look like much, but it was getting its rider along well. The two remounts on a string behind him were Tartar horses, taller and slimmer and more handsome, but although they carried only light loads, twin sacks, they looked more worn-down.

  “So he’s either expectin
g a fight or just come from one. Most likely running. Who goes on a raid alone? He rides well, too,” Sergey said to himself. “As well as a Cossack. A bit of a runt, but not a moujik, not a peasant.”

  All Cossacks considered themselves noblemen, of course, even though they did their own work.

  The man was well-armed too, with an inward-curved yataghan sword at his waist, an odd-looking flat quiver of arrows over his back and a bow in his fist; a round shield of leather-covered cane and a braided lariat were hung at his saddlebow. Apart from that, he wore boots and leather trousers and a shirt of mail over a leather jacket, warm gear for midsummer unless he expected a fight. As he watched, the stranger halted and looked backwards carefully, standing in his stirrups and raising a hand to shade his eyes.

  Sergey nodded to himself, cased the binoculars, picked up his lance, and whistled to his horse, swinging effortlessly into the saddle as the beast unfolded itself and rose. The stranger reacted instantly, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow; he was about three hundred meters away now, extreme bowshot for a strong man and a heavy stave. That motion halted as Sergey held his lance up horizontally over his head, and then reversed it and drove it point-down in the earth in sign of his peaceful intentions, leaving his own bow cased at his left knee. Then he waited quietly as the stranger jog-trotted forward and halted within talking distance.

  They looked each other over. Sergey was a young man, just turned twenty, a thumb’s width under six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with lean muscles like ropes and a longish straight-nosed face. And an impressive collection of scars, many of which showed because he was wearing only baggy wool pantaloons and high hide boots and the broad leather belt that supported his shashka-saber and dagger and a light axe with a meter-long handle. His head was shaved save for a long yellow scalplock bound with thongs that hung down past his shoulder from over his right ear. Mustaches of the same corn-color were still distressingly fuzzy on his upper lip; his slightly tilted eyes were pale green, bright in his tanned face.

  The other man looked a little like a Tartar, but darker than most— umber-brown skin, braided black hair, with a flat almost scalloped-in face, high cheekbones, and a snub nose. The narrow slanted eyes were blue, but raiding for women back and forth had gone on long enough that you couldn’t judge who was who by looks alone. The stranger was shorter than Sergey, strong-looking, but slim and apparently a youth just barely old enough to take the war-trail; even for a black-arse, his face was very hairless. Sweat gleamed on that smooth impassive countenance.

  The stranger spoke first. “Russki?” he said, in a voice that sounded even younger than his face, pointing at Sergey.

  The Cossack nodded and slapped a fist against his bare chest, making the silver crucifix slung there bounce.

  “Da, Russki, Khristianin,” he said. “Yes, Russian, Christian.”

  “I am name Dorzha Abakov,” the stranger replied.

  “Sergey Ivanovitch Khorkina, me. I am a Cossack, stanitsa of Polovo in the Don Host, under Ataman Oleg Andreivitch Arkhipov. And you, flat-face boy?”

  “Tanghch people; Kalmyk, you Russki say. My ruler is Erdne Khan of Elst.”

  From the far reaches, Sergey thought, his brows rising in surprise.

  He’d never heard of the khan, and only vaguely of the Kalmyks, who grazed their herds and pitched their yurts in the dry steppe south of Astrakhan on the Caspian shore. Dorzha’s eastern-flavored Russian was rough but understandable; a guttural undertone suggested something else that was probably his native language.

  “Musul’manin?” Sergey asked suspiciously

  Dorzha spat with scorn; shook his head, and pointed upward. “Worship Tengri Etseg—Eternal Blue Father Sky—and the Merciful Buddha, not stupid gods from books.”

  That could have been an insult to the holy Orthodox faith, but the Kalmyk’s next words concentrated Sergey’s mind wonderfully, along with the eastward jerk of his thumb:

  “Nogai men follow me to kill. Five and two.”

  “Seven Tartars?” Sergey yelped.

  Dorzha nodded. “Seven, da, is that word.” Helpfully, he held up one hand and two fingers of the other.

  “They were nine when they start after me,” he added, with a smile that exposed teeth that were very even and white, and patted the hilt of his yataghan. Then he indicated his remounts: “These their horses. Now my horses.”

  Sergey cursed fluently and at length, regretting his decision not to kill the wanderer from ambush. Probably the Tartars would have turned back if they’d just found the body; they were getting too close to the stanitsa to be safe. Now...even without a blood-debt, any Nogai who found a Russian alone here would fill him full of arrows as a matter of course, unless they went to the effort of trying to capture him for torture or the slave markets. There wasn’t a truce on at present, and this wasn’t anywhere near the recognized trade-trail along the Belgorod-Volga railway in any case.

  He suppressed an impulse to gallop away. If he just rode off, how could he keep this Dorzha from following him out of bowshot?

  The black-arse devils would track us both! No wonder the little Kalmyk bastard is smiling!

  The odds against him had just been cut in half.

  But I’ve got a fight at three-to-one on my hands. The devil’s grandmother fly away with him!

  Then he laughed and leaned forward in the saddle, extending his hand.

  “It’s been a while since I let any blood, anyway,” Sergey said.

  Dorzha took the hand, and a long swig from the flask Sergey offered next, along with a little bread and salt from his saddlebags. The Cossack drank from the Kalmyk’s offered canteen in return; it held kumiss, fermented mare’s milk. Kumis was better than water, and that was all you could say for it.

  “We run more or fight here?” Dorzha asked. “This is ground of yours...no, this is your ground, you would say.”

  Sergey looked around, then cocked an eye at the Kalmyk’s horses. They looked thirsty as well as tired, slobbering and showing their tongues. And if the pursued hadn’t been able to stop for water, then the pursuers probably hadn’t either....

  “Hey, dog-brother, there’s an old well in that ruined kolkhoz over there,” he said thoughtfully. “The Tartar swine know it and they’ll probably water their horses at it.”

  Dorzha grinned and nodded, making a motion to the west and then a curving gesture to indicate turning north and coming back parallel to their own tracks.

  “Way to cut back and hide in wrecked of houses without being seen? They come soon, maybe—”

  He pointed to the sun, and then to where it would be in about an hour.

  “Catch us in twice that long if we run.”

  Sergey laughed; the Kalmyk had grasped the essentials quickly.

  “Da. There is a deep ravine four kilometers west that runs to the northeast; we can use that, then come in on the ruins from the north, if we’re quick. I like the way you think, Kalmyk! Let’s go!”

  * * * *

  Therewere seven of the Tartars, men with straggly mustaches and sparse beards, dingy green turbans, long filthy sheepskin coats...and unpleasantly clean and well-cared-for weapons.

  Sergey looked through a dirty scrap of ancient glass as the enemy dismounted in the thin grass at the center of the old settlement, near a crumbling mound of rust that had been one of the devil’s magic oxen before the machines stopped.

  A tractor, they’d called it, according to the old stories, first conjured out of Hell by the evil wizards of the Red Steel Czar to oppress the peasants. According to his great-grandmother, at least. Grandfather Mikhail had always said they were just machines, like a clock or a reaper, and a lot less work in plowing time than a team of oxen. Sergey had his doubts about that—if they weren’t moved by evil spirits, why should they all stop working at the same time?

  But Grandfather could certainly tell a story, true or not. To plow sitting down, as if you were taking your ease in a tavern!

  None of the Nogai were more than twenty
meters away, their boots clumping in the dust and raising little puffs through the sparse grass. That was close enough for the Cossack to smell the hard rancid sweat-and-butter stink of them, as strong as the dry earth and the ancient brick and wood of the ruin.

  The well had a built-up earthen coping around it, and a good solid cover of wood; the buildings had been stripped long ago of anything useful, down to wagonloads of bricks, and the frame ones on the outskirts had burned in the yearly grass-fires, but no steppe-dweller would destroy a well, whether Cossack or Tartar or even vagabond bandits. The Tartars looked tired, and their horses worse, despite having three remounts each. The animals were thirsty, too; the slant-eyed men had to hold them back as soon as they smelled water, wrestling with bridles, flicking their quirts at noses and cursing as the eager animals jostled and tossed their heads.